Kings Langley cyber hacker ordered to pay back £69k

A cyber hacker who made £300,000 selling home-made software to crash websites and computer networks around the world has been ordered to pay back £69,000.

Adam Mudd, 20, invented the ‘Titanium Stresser’ programme when he was 16, which was used to attack 1.7 million websites by overloading them with millions of simultaneous requests for access.

Mudd, of Toms Lane, Kings Langley, carried out 595 ‘attacks’ himself, including on West Herts College where he studied, between September 2013 and April 2015.

He netted £298,267 from sales of the programme, and admitted to charges under the misuse of computer act and money laundering before being jailed for two years last April.

The Old Bailey heard on Monday that Mudd laundered money through PayPal but spent very little of his ill-gotten cash because he was living at home with his parents.

Judge Michael Topolski QC ruled Mudd had benefited to the tune of £171,000 from his criminality and ordered him to repay £69,629.44 or face a further two years in jail.

Mudd would ‘need time securing their release from various PayPal accounts in Luxembourg’ the court heard.

Ben Cooper, for Mudd, blamed his behaviour on the ‘relentless’ bullying he had suffered at school as a result of his Asperger’s Syndrome.

He said: “At the time he had been lost in a fantasy world for a long period – he withdrew from his school after a sustained spell of bullying. He withdrew also from his family into his bedroom. He became more and more sucked into it.”

Mr Cooper said that despite being very bright, Mudd had failed most subjects at school apart from maths and computer science.